At long last, new episodes of Futurama aired on Comedy Central, after a long hiatus.

A four-part story arc was presented.

Numerical analysis below fold... more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:06 PM | Comments (44)
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On Friday, DHS issued a supplemental rulemaking for the No-Match Rule that was enjoined by U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer back in the fall. The No-Match rule is opposed by a coalition of labor and civil liberties groups who cannot agree on much except how very much they love underpaid illegals.

The Bush administration yesterday renewed its drive to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal immigrants by slightly altering an earlier initiative stalled by a federal judge since last September.

If the new proposal satisfies the court, the government could begin warning 140,000 employers in writing as early as June about suspect Social Security numbers used by their employees and force businesses to resolve questions about their identities or fire them within 90 days.

Gainful U.S. employment is one of the major factors contributing to illegal immigration (possibly the most important). Until we control it, we won't control our own borders.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:32 PM | Comments (37)
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Happy Easter, morons. Here's a basket of green plastic grass and schandenfreude for you to enjoy.

The Oblammo (see, its blowing up, get it?) campaign has been severely butthurt over the whole passport fiasco for the past week. They've been calling for investigations and spouting off the usual self-righteous bullshit. For example, some douchebag over at the Obama campaign named Bill Burton got his hose clamp undone and spouted

This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard blah blah yadda yadda I'm a douchebag look at me lol j/k

Apparently ObamaJesusSaviorOurLord should have stuck Burton's nozzle deep in somewhere it couldn't spew because at least one of the snoopers turns out to work for an advisor on the Obama campaign.

Now the question becomes: whose passports did this tool of the Obama campaign snoop on, by whose orders was this done, and exactly what does el baggo de los doochos Burton think about that?

I tell ya, folks, I can hardly wait until the convention. The way things are going now, its almost guaranteed that the superdelegates will break for Hillarity!. And you know what that means, don't you?

I can hardly wait. Christmas is coming twice this year!

Posted by: Open Blog at 04:06 PM | Comments (39)
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Old. But I still laugh. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 AM | Comments (40)
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Semi-blasphemous video below the jump. Sorry. But I like it. more...

Posted by: LauraW at 06:29 AM | Comments (95)
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Bummer. Sent an email to Pixy about it. PIXY FIXY.

Pixy sez: The hamsters were slacking off because they knew Ace had gone out. A taste of the lash sorted the lazy little blighters out.

But while we're waiting, here's a little something from the desk of Captain Obvious:

Young men usually misinterpret women's behavior.

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more," said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

This "lost in translation" phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

Some might think the results come down to "boys being boys," and so even the slightest female interest sparks sexual fantasy. But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys - they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

Most women notice, usually at some point in their late teens, that they can't be as friendly to some people anymore because it gets totally misconstrued.

It's noted in the article that this is not true of all young men, and that some are highly skilled at reading nonverbal behaviors. I'm going to assume that none of those guys visit this site.

For those youngsters who may be flummoxed trying to decode precisely what a woman is trying to tell you with her body language, what follows is a handy reference guide for a few common female behaviors and what they mean. more...

Posted by: LauraW at 04:59 AM | Comments (40)
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My bet is on an excuse to play World of Warcraft but Wired Magazine seems to think there is some value here.

Virtual terrorists blowing themselves up and spreading disease inside World of Warcraft could provide counterterrorists with a window into real-world plots.

Such activities in the massively multiplayer online game bear an eerie resemblance to actual terrorism, and analyzing terror tactics in Warcraft could prove more enlightening than current computer simulations used by counterterrorists.

...

Scientists have already noted World of Warcraft's usefulness in studying how diseases spread. The game's network of 10 million players -- each capable of making decisions, either logical or illogical, rational or irrational -- gives scientists a ready-made virtual world to scrutinize that's not based on computer models or artificial intelligence. The game could be an invaluable tool not only for counterterrorists and epidemiologists but also sociologists and economists.

I actually proposed using World of Warcraft to test Ron Paul's gold standard theories last year, and was soundly criticized by everyone who has ever seen the word economy much less taken an economics class, but hey I read this blog so by definition I am a moron, so maybe these guys know something I don't.

Posted by: Open Blog at 01:05 PM | Comments (27)
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Heading out of the apartment for the first time this week. It's not healthy, is it?

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (51)
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From "balloon-breasted" women to now outright, anatomically-detailed full-on penetrative porn.

Typical purveyor of filth? Usual artist trying to get attention through outrage and shock value?

Well... yes. And No.

Currin's mood today is perhaps buoyed by what he has achieved with that single finished canvas, a languid scene of boy-girl penetration with no anatomical detail spared, which quickly tells you that Currin has entered a porn phase (meaning many of his new canvases are too explicit for publication in a national newspaper).

...

Part of the problem, Currin asserts, is that critics somehow take offence when artists start making serious money. "They have a bug up their ass if you get high prices for things. They wouldn't say this stuff about Mary J Blige. I have never understood this idea that there is something scandalous about artists making money."

Hold tight, it gets better.

...

Indeed, he now acknowledges that several factors contributed to what was indeed a long dry period after the retrospective – a time when, he says, he was also depressed and experiencing a disconcerting "impotence with the brush". Currin remained shaken, for instance, by the experiences of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, which had almost cast their shadows on the block where he lived. "I don't think anybody would be able to deduce it from my pictures – the way my life changed and my mood changed and my surroundings changed after that. It was a dividing line in my life."

...

It might seem "silly" or "bombastic" (Currin's words) to try thereafter to cast these new works in the context of Islamic fundamentalism and more specifically the furious reaction in parts of the Muslim world to the publication by a Danish newspaper in 2005 of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohamed. But this is where Currin, almost embarrassed by the murkiness of what he is saying, takes the conversation.

...

Few things motivate, meanwhile, more than anger and that is what was stirred in Currin by the cartoon furore. He was infuriated first by the tirades of some Islamic clerics against the cartoon and was then doubly dismayed by what he considered the cowardly response of the West and its media. "I found it incredibly dispiriting that The New York Times and Time magazine wouldn't publish the cartoon. After people had been killed over these things, they wouldn't show people what it was about. You could not find it anywhere." He goes on: "I am caught up in a lot in fear for Europe and fear for the West, that we will lose the war against Islam. And it is a war against Islam, I think."

At this point, I have to confess to losing Currin's thread a little. Are these paintings therefore some kind of repudiation of our political correctness? Or perhaps a celebration of our freedoms, now under threat, including the freedom to disseminate porn? Something like that, he says.

Thanks to DelD.

One Not Quite Safe For Work pic here, though before, it seems, his outright porn phase.

More images through Google -- including the porno ones (need to take off safe search, of course).

Eh, true enough, he's still doing the standard artistic thing of shocking the squares and outraging the rubes.

However, unlike most, he's not too stupid -- or too cowardly -- to name those who are truly responsible for medieval oppression and sexual hyperpanic.

Plus... look at the tits!

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (60)
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Don't crucify Obama! He's a human being! Or at least he's taken a human form for the time being!

Get thee behind me, Bill Richardson!

Once again, Obama, Your Own Personal Jesus. Love that last quote.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (48)
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